A couple of weeks ago George Simmers at Great War Fiction posted about some problems with applying the Marxist concept of ideological hegemony to the outbreak of the First World War. He criticized some vaguely Marxist influenced historians and literary critics who said that people were tricked by propaganda into supporting the war and then became disillusioned. I wanted to reply to his post, but every time I drafted a comment in my head it just ended up saying “I don’t really know”. I do know that George is right to say “These are words to be used with care.” Like many things, the concept of ideology can be useful if used well but can also be counterproductive if used badly. So in this post I’m going to try and explain what ideology means to me, and how it’s useful in my own work. Bear that in mind while reading, as when you see the words “ideology is”, that’s shorthand for “I think ideology is”, and not the definite assertion that it looks like.

Ideology is assumptions people take for granted without question. These assumptions might be a certain way of thinking about things which excludes different but equally valid possibilities; they might be factually wrong; they might be harmful. At its narrowest ideology means almost the same thing as prejudice, but at its widest it means almost the same thing as culture. Therefore some might say it’s not a very useful concept, but I still feel that I need it. Prejudice implies an individual failing which individuals can be blamed for. Culture implies something unthreatening, and even benign. Ideology is a widespread system of beliefs which can be potentially dangerous, and which often is dangerous in practice. If an ideology is widespread enough (and I define this very vaguely) it can be described as a dominant ideology, or ideological hegemony. For me the best example of ideological hegemony is gender. Why do people assume so many things about men and women? Why are people classed as men and women at all? Gender often claims to be supported by biology, but it isn’t. Biologists can classify organisms according to their reproductive organs, but this taxonomy is only relevant to the biological process of reproduction and not to anything else. If we’re talking about reproduction then we necessarily have to bring fertility into consideration, and that completely undermines a simple binary opposition between male and female. Is a woman only a woman when she’s fertile? If so, what is she when she isn’t fertile? Does her gender change with her menstrual cycle? Most of what we “know” about differences between men and women is ideology.

Ideology is in minds and in culture, but this poses a problem. No-one really knows enough about how minds and culture work to make any strong and convincing claims for or against the existence of ideology or its influence on historical causation. These days I usually work from the premise that other minds are unknowable. I got this idea from postmodern historian Keith Jenkins, but I’m, also convinced that it’s supported by empirical science. The cognitive and neuro-sciences have given us bits and pieces of evidence but they’re still a long way off from being able to tell us exactly what people think and why. In any case, we’ll never have direct access to minds/brains that existed in the past but which don’t exist now, no matter how far brain scanning advances in the future. So how can I make any claims about ideology or think that it’s any use to me? The key is that it’s in culture as well as in minds, and that culture manifests itself outside minds as well as within them, and these manifestations have real consequences (eg who gets power and wealth, and who doesn’t). Without knowing the insides of minds we can still see traces of ideology in words, actions, and physical objects. If the same assumption crops up in lots of different texts, then we have to suspect ideology, especially if that assumption is empirically wrong (eg women are too small and weak to fight in wars; for more details see this post). This Nietzschean suspicion is necessary regardless of what we do or don’t know about how culture works. Suspicion is not the same as proof or conclusions, but it’s always useful. If you’re not suspicious then you’re not trying. But I don’t buy the idea of false consciousness. Even if you don’t see other minds as unknowable, how can you tell an authentic idea from a false one? If a belief is in someone’s mind and they sincerely believe it (or think they do), what makes it any less sincere than anything else they might believe? If the belief has the same effects on reality, does it matter if it’s authentic or false? (I have some similar reservations about the hidden transcript, but that’s another story.)

Ideology often denies that it is ideology. The most ideological things are often the things which appear most normal. We should be suspicious when anyone says that there is no ideology to see. For example, the revisionist historians who dominated the study of the English Civil War in the 1970s and 1980s were generally hostile to Marxism and feminism. There seemed to be an assumption that these approaches were politically biased and therefore illegitimate, but this ignored the fact that the revisionists had their own conservative or liberal ideological assumptions which inevitably influenced their work. Ideology is not just overt political manifestos, and it isn’t just something that “extremists” have. The revisionist influence on the study of the English Civil War has left us with a dangerously narrow definition of ideology.

Ideology is not easily controlled. This is at least partly because no-one really understands how it works. It can’t be quickly turned on and off by propaganda in response to an emergency. Ideology often serves the interests of governments, and they can influence it in some ways, but what they try to do might not work, or might have unintended consequences. Anti-Catholicism was encouraged by Elizabeth I in England in order to secure her position as monarch. It’s debatable whether it actually became a dominant ideology during her reign, but it certainly was by the reign of Charles I (despite him being more sympathetic towards Catholics than Elizabeth had been). In the early 1640s parliament tried to manipulate anti-Catholicism for its own ends. This was partly successful, because it encouraged the Colchester mob to disarm Sir John Lucas in August 1642, something which was definitely in the interests of parliament. But this sparked off a wave of anti-Catholic and anti-royalist rioting across Essex and Suffolk which alarmed parliament’s supporters among the gentry, threatened property rights, and allowed the royalists to claim that they were the party of order. Because ideology is about what is ostensibly normal, it can be hard to trace the ideology and its effects in abnormal situations (although people’s perceptions of whether a situation is normal or abnormal are likely to be influenced by their own ideological assumptions). Ideology is likely to be one of the things that influence complex events (such as wars and revolutions) but it can’t be a single simple cause. Ideology as I define it is often a better explanation of what doesn’t happen than what does. Why wasn’t there a women’s revolution, or a civil war between men and women? That’ll be the dominant ideology.

Ideology is not easy to spot, because it masquerades as the normal and the unremarkable. We have to work hard to overcome our own ideological assumptions and question what is there by default. Cultural changes can sometimes make it easier to identify ideology in the past. For example, white British people are now more likely to recognize that golliwogs and minstrel shows are horribly racist, and be shocked that they were mainstream family entertainment until quite recently. This does not make us superior to people in the past. Many of our ideological assumptions which we have failed to question will look awful in the future, as George pointed out when he caught the Guardian being homophobic in 1918. But this is not progress (and progress itself is a dubious ideology – see this discussion at Historiann). Ideology does not necessarily improve over time. I’m not being a complete moral relativist here. I think some ideologies are better than others, but things can get worse or stay the same as well as getting better. Liberalism has its problems, but it’s better than fascism despite being older.

Ideology is built into language. The grammar and vocabulary we have access to make it difficult to avoid perpetuating ideology. In English there are many insulting words for a promiscuous woman (eg slut, slag, slapper, tart, whore) but not for a promiscuous man. The double standard is right there in that ostensibly most neutral of books, the dictionary. Use of the word “raped” as a passive verb is common and grammatically correct, but puts us on a slippery slope towards victim blaming. Compare “someone raped her” with “she was raped”. Both technically correct, both technically saying the same thing, but with a significantly different emphasis. The common colloquial habit of using “got” instead of “was” to indicate the perfect passive makes it even worse. “She got raped” makes it sound like something that the victim brought on herself through her own failings, or even wanted!

So that’s what I mean when I write about ideology. I like to think that I use the concept carefully, but I’m not about to defend people who don’t use it carefully (and I think Julian Putkowski is someone who does use it carefully and gets good results from it). I’ll probably write some more about seeing ideology soon. In the meantime, be suspicious and trust no-one.

Bill Turkel has been testing a really cool piece of equipment. The MDX-20 can turn 3D computer models into physical objects, and can automatically scan physical objects to make 3D computer models of them. And it doesn’t rely on magic, alchemy, or the Dark Side of the Force. There are so many interesting things that could be done with this (not all of them related to SL avs, Weird Science, and “In Every Dream Home A Heartache”…). As Bill says, “the possibilities seem nearly endless”. Strangely, the first thing that came into my mind when I read about it was palaeontology. Maybe if this technology gets good enough it might be possible to digitize collections of fossils, then researchers could easily run off life size replicas instead of flying to China to measure dinosaur bones (but there might be drawbacks that I haven’t thought of because I don’t know enough about dinosaur measuring). As the David Baird quotes in Bill’s post make clear, objects created by the MDX-20 are models, not recreations of the thing itself how it really is. Just like theroetical models and digital resources, what we get is some aspects of the thing (usually the ones we’re most interested in) but not all of them.

Nick at Mercurius Politicus points out that while digital collections like EEBO give us easier access to some aspects of early modern texts, there are other aspects that we don’t get to experience unless we go back to the originals. “Reading them on a screen today is inevitably a different experience to reading actual copies.” Like Nick, I’m not sure what impact this has or is going to have on how we read these texts. Even with the original physical books in our hands we’re still a very long way from being able to reconstruct the meanings that readers found in them in the 17th century. Holding a book, feeling the paper, seeing the colour of the ink, will necessarily suggest more or different meanings to me than when I see a PDF on screen, but those are still my perceived meanings, and not necessarily anyone else’s. On the other hand, being able to see a physical difference between two books which isn’t apparent on EEBO gives a new insight and has to affect the range of possible meanings, even if we’re not sure exactly how.

This isn’t something that only applies to early-modern print culture. Brett at Airminded mentioned in his excellent series of posts on the Sudeten crisis that British newspapers in the 1930s tended to have the most important stories in the middle, not on the front page. I had absolutely no idea that this was the case. It’s not something that’s obvious if you’re just dipping into the Times Digital Archive as you just get one page out of context.

And it doesn’t just apply to print. The same issues come up with old computer games. I can play my old favourite C64 games on my PC using an emulator, but the experience isn’t the same as playing them on a real C64 in the 80s. In many ways it’s better – you don’t have to wait for tapes to load, there aren’t as many crashes – but from a historian’s point of view it’s obviously not a perfect way of reconstructing the past.

Thanks to Amazon I’ve just picked up very cheap second hand copies of:

1. Sarah Barber, A revolutionary rogue Henry Marten and the English republic (Sutton,: Stroud :, 2000).
2. Ivor Waters, Henry Marten and the Long Parliament (Chepstow Society: Chepstow, 1976).

I’m planning to write an article about Henry Marten’s attempt to raise a cavalry regiment in 1643, so I want to read everything that’s been written about him. That seems to be surprisingly little considering how interesting he is. The RHS Bibliography only returns 8 results for titles containing the words “Henry Marten”. He was arguably the most radical member of the Long Parliament, but perhaps he’s difficult to deal with because he doesn’t fit the puritan stereotype. That’s always a problem for arguments that the English Civil War was a war of religion, and it’s not really enough to say that he was just the exception that proves the rule.

This project was going to be my third article, but now it’s been promoted as the Difficult Second Article is officially dead. It was just too difficult to give it a strong enough argument to stand up as an article, but I haven’t given up on my analysis of horse donations. I think it would work better as a sample chapter for a book proposal. Then it would fit in with bigger arguments about negotiation of property rights and authority, and the construction of identities. And it won’t have to take in the causes of the civil war, which is a relief. As I mentioned before I’ve realised that I’m really not very interested in that question, and there’s no point trying to write about things you’re not interested in. That’s probably one of the reasons why it was so difficult. Also I have a theoretical problem with causation in general: in order to explain why things happened we need to know why people did things. But other minds are unknowable. Therefore we can’t really explain any historical events if the causal chains pass through people’s minds.

More thoughts relating to my last post on Glenn Burgess on revisionism. I was making what might look like esoteric theoretical points there, and it might not always be immediately obvious how that applies to the existing historiography in practice. Anti-theory polemic often constructs a false dichotomy between all points of view being equally valid on the one hand and only one objective truth being valid on the other. I think things are more complicated than that. Although I reject objectivity I do think that there are many interpretations of history which are invalid for various reasons, including being internally inconsistent, not being very well supported by their own evidence, or even contradicting the laws of physics. But once we’ve dismissed all these interpretations as being impossible, we could potentially be left with many interpretations which are possible. This is where we get the theoretical issues that I wrote about before. It might not be possible, or even necessary, to choose between all these possible interpretations and choose a single correct one.

Applying this to English/British Civil War/Revolution historiography can illustrate the point, but it’s not necessarily obvious because other, more obvious, factors get in the way. For a start, many histories of this period (particularly, but not only, from Whigs and Marxists) have fallen at the first fence because they are internally inconsistent and/or not well supported by their own evidence (these are arguably the same thing, because poor evidence is an inconsistency for any empirical work but possibly irrelevant to non-empirical work). More have fallen at the second fence because other historians have produced evidence which contradicts them. Most, if not all, of the histories written from Gardiner onwards have shared certain basic empirical assumptions, so it’s perhaps surprising that these works have often not lived up to empirical standards of proof. Pointing that out should be alarming, but it might also be misleadingly comforting. Surely if everyone genuinely adhered to proper empirical standards we’d be able to find the one true story, wouldn’t we? I don’t think so. The fact that in practice so many historians have tried to argue for interpretations which are impossible doesn’t do anything to diminish the theoretical possibilities for an abundance of interpretations which can’t be dismissed as wrong but which can’t be chosen between. In practice we’re only just starting to see this.

Following Glenn Burgess’s example, I’ll take two different works and compare them: John Adamson’s The Noble Revolt and John Walter’s Understanding Popular Violence. Both books are meticulously researched to the highest standards (or at least higher than most other books I’ve seen). Their descriptions of what happened would be difficult to challenge on empirical grounds. Both relate to the causes and outbreak of the First Civil War but each has a very narrow focus rather than offering an overarching model which claims to explain everything. It is perhaps this focus that allows the authors to be so meticulous, and therefore avoid falling at the early empirical fences. This is not to say that they are less ambitious than Lawrence Stone or David Underdown (examples of historians who did attempt overarching explanatory models), just that their ambitions might be pointing in a different direction. Neither Adamson nor Walter explicitly claims to be telling the whole story. They have omitted many things and made arbitrary decisions about what to include, as any historian must when writing any history, but they have not attempted to close down other possibilities outside their chosen scope. This is not to say that they think anything goes. Within their chosen scope, both have demolished previous interpretations which now look impossible or at least highly improbable. The most important thing is that these books do not contradict each other much, if at all. It would be quite easy to see them as dealing with different parts of the same thing. Therefore we have two interpretations which differ because their focus and end points differ, but which are not mutually exclusive. However, I suspect that it would be difficult to synthesize both works into a single overarching thesis in the style of Lawrence Stone. They’re just different. Taken together they suggest that the civil war might be too big and complicated to ever be distilled into a single work. I think that this will become increasingly obvious in the future as we see more books like these.

1. John Adamson, The Noble Revolt (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007).
2. Glenn Burgess, ‘On revisionism: an analysis of early Stuart historiography in the 1970s and 1980s’, Historical Journal, 33 (1990), pp. 609-27.
3. John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999).

‘On Revisionism’ is an important article from 1990 (you can download it free from Historical Journal) in which Glenn Burgess sets out a fair appraisal of what revisionism is (or was) and defends it from some unfair criticisms, then makes some more sophisticated criticisms. It’s possibly unfair to beat Burgess with a stick that hadn’t been published at the time he was writing and which was (and perhaps still is) considered extremely radical, but I’d like to compare this article with the work of Keith Jenkins, and some of the theorists who inform his work, because there are some surprising similarities. Ultimately Burgess and Jenkins draw different conclusions, but they are tackling some of the same problems and at times use similar arguments. For the purposes of this post I’m not going to question empirical epistemological foundations at all, but if we accept that the past really happened, and that we can know facts about what really happened, there are still many practical and theoretical problems concerning what to do with those facts.

Burgess starts by pointing out that revisionists in the 1970s saw a need to study politics on its own terms because they recognized that politics could not be reduced to anything else. He also points out that even Christopher Hill accepted that the cultural superstructure could not be entirely reduced to the economic base. Brian Manning seems to implicitly support this despite his attempts to defend the base/superstructure model.

I find Herbert Butterfield’s 1931 critique of Whig history interesting because he seems so close to Lyotard, and yet so far away. Butterfield recognized that the entirety of what really happened in the past was too vast too fit into a single book, and that therefore writing a general history involves a great deal of omission. He was critical of the Whigs because he believed that their decisions about what to include and what to omit distorted the truth. The problem which Burgess points out with this view, and where it diverges from Lyotard, is that Butterfield believed that it was possible to write an abridged history which didn’t distort the truth and maintained the one true meaning of history. I agree that this is not possible, and that it invalidates the particular argument which Butterfield tried to make, but he was still onto something with his suspicion that there was a problem with the way Whigs constructed their narrative. Lyotard’s problem with Whig and Marxist grand narratives was not that they distort the truth, but that they present only one truth and claim that this is the only truth. Therefore they suffer from exactly the same fallacy as Butterfield. Arbitrary selection and omission of facts is unavoidable when writing historical narratives, but what can and should be avoided is closing down other possibilities by claiming to have written the only possible narrative. As Burgess points out later in the article, there are many different ways of writing the story of the English Civil War.

Perhaps the most well-known point that Burgess makes is about teleology. He makes a crucial distinction between strong and weak teleology. Strong teleology, which claims that the outcome of a narrative was always inevitable, is obviously wrong. This was a weakness of Whig narratives of progress towards democracy, and Marxist narratives of class struggle. However, Burgess criticizes revisionists for conflating both kinds teleology and trying to get rid of the whole thing. This is an impossible and counterproductive task. Not only is weak teleology not a problem, Burgess shows that it’s absolutely necessary for writing any kind of history. In order to write a historical narrative you have to give it some kind of structure. You have to know where the story is going to end up in order to decide which facts to include and which to omit. There is no objective way of deciding which facts are important because the importance of facts is relative to the story you want to tell. Again this isn’t so very different from Lyotard or Hayden White.

The concept of anachronism is also related to teleology. As Burgess says, strong teleology is anachronistic, which it obviously is. However his definition of anachronism also includes “the use of present day categories to organize our accounts of the past”, and this is described as “reprehensible”. I’m not convinced by this part of the argument as I’m not sure that it’s possible to write about the past without using any present day concepts. Hayden White, Frank Ankersmit, and Keith Jenkins would all say that everything in history above the level of very basic facts is metaphorical. In what way can concepts in present day minds not be present day concepts? Maybe it would be possible to write a historical narrative which uses only contemporary language and concepts but that would be a pastiche of contemporary writing. That would be an interesting possibility, and I hear that Ariel Hessayon has attempted something like it, but I don’t think it’s what Glenn Burgess was calling for. In fact his critique of Clarendon implies that he would not consider such an approach to be “proper” history.

Burgess insists that Clarendon “is not in any modern sense an historian at all” because “his purposes are consequently (in our terms) moral rather than historical” (p. 622). Keith Jenkins deconstructs the concept of “bias” showing how the dismissal of some sources and historians as biased allows the historians doing the dismissing to believe that they are not biased themselves and have achieved objectivity. Burgess is clearly falling into this trap by identifying Clarendon as the Other who is not-history, against whom “proper” historians can define themselves. It’s not clear to me that having a moral purpose stops writing from being history (I dare anyone to try telling me that feminist history isn’t proper history), or that it’s possible to write without a moral purpose. Even trying to exclude other people’s morals from history could be seen as a moral purpose of sorts.

His other problem with Clarendon is that “human wickedness and incompetence, without providence will produce only chaos. And chaos has no story, no history” (p. 623). First of all I think that history could well be chaos in the scientific sense of chaos theory, but I don’t think that this is what Burgess was getting at. He probably meant it in the more common sense of randomness or lack of order. But perhaps history is random and disordered, in that the body of knowable facts about the past is so vast and unintelligible that it might as well be random until we impose some kind of order on it by structuring it into a coherent narrative (with all the arbitrary decisions which that entails). It is entirely possible to construct a narrative which tells a story of random things which don’t happen for any apparent good reason. Burgess more or less concedes this by characterizing Clarendon’s work in pretty much these terms (and for even more extreme examples of narratives of chaos see Samuel Beckett or Franz Kafka). For Burgess Clarendon fails to be proper historian again because he fails to explain things properly, but this is all down to a difference of opinion between Burgess and Clarendon about what counts as a proper explanation.

This is not to say that Burgess has a narrow view of what historical explanation should be. He’s against determinism, strong teleology, and randomness but he acknowledges that many different explanations are possible and that choosing between them might not be possible. As an example, he takes a model of the civil war as baronial revolt, based on Conrad Russell and John Adamson, and contrasts it with a model of the civil war as war of religion, based on John Morrill. He points out that these two explanations are not necessarily mutually exclusive and could just be different ways of constructing a narrative about the same events. Both might be true but incomplete, describing different parts of the same problem. This suggests that many more narratives of the same events might be possible. I suspect that, as Michael Braddick has recently suggested, the story of the English Civil War will never be complete because there will always be more aspects of the story which could be told, or aspects which could be told differently. Historiography has traditionally been much more adversarial than this, consisting of knocking down old interpretations and replacing them with something else, which in its turn gets knocked down and replaced. Perhaps revisionism was the beginning of the end of that process. Whig and Marxist narratives clearly needed to be cleared away because they claimed to explain everything and denied opportunities for different views. If revisionism hasn’t put anything similar in their place that could be seen as a success rather than a failure (although there are many ways in which revisionists have tried to close down potentially valid possibilities, such as Conrad Russell’s refusal to engage with the question of revolution).

There are still traces of the adversarial approach in the article, as Burgess went on to look for ways of choosing between explanations. He points out that explanations of the same thing might not be about the same thing if you look closer. The relative strengths and weaknesses of an explanation depend on what it’s trying to explain. If you choose a different end point you get a different narrative with a different explanation. Therefore how you explain the civil war depends heavily on how you define it. This is all good. At this point it seems to me that the logical conclusion should be that because different people choose to write different narratives with different end points their explanations are always going to be different and that there might not be any way of choosing between them (or any need to choose between them). And above all there’s no objective way of deciding what you should try to explain, or deciding how to define the problem. It’s an arbitrary decision which depends on things like personal taste, audience expectations, and yes, moral purpose.

Surprisingly, the final section doesn’t go where the rest of the article seems to be pointing. Burgess ends up trying to find an objective way of choosing between explanations by looking for an objective way of choosing between end points. Against all the odds, he seems to think he’s found it. He concludes that what we should try to explain is what most needs explaining, and that what most needs explaining is what was most unusual or unique. I think there are lots of problems with this. First there’s the problem of defining the problem. Burgess earlier argued that historians find different explanations of the Civil War because they have different definitions of what the Civil War was (and up til now he implicitly accepts that there is no objective way of choosing between these definitions). At the beginning of section V he suddenly jumps from using the term “Civil War” to using “the English revolution”. This is highly significant, because from this point on he maintains (without explaining exactly why) that we can objectively know exactly what the English revolution was, and can objectively compare it with other historical events to see what the similarities and differences were. I don’t see how this follows at all. If we can’t define the civil war, how can we define the revolution? Don’t the same problems apply to both concepts, or neither? To me “revolution” looks like an abstract/analytic concept which can be (and in practice has been) defined in many different ways. There can’t be an empirical test for a revolution without a definition to test against. If you don’t define a revolution you can’t find one, which is possibly why Conrad Russell was so reluctant to even discuss the question.

Even if we could agree on what the English revolution was and determine which bits of it were most unusual (tricky, since Burgess himself says earlier in the article that things which appear the same might not be the same when you look closer), would this mean that we had to focus only on the unusual things and ignore what was usual? I disagree for three reasons.

First, because we don’t need to limit ourselves to writing about things which are generally agreed to be important. There might be many interesting works to be written about “usual” things, and there are more than enough historians to go around. We don’t all have to write about the same thing.

Second, because this line of argument seems to assume that some things, such as baronial coups, are just conditions of a certain period. Steve Rigby convincingly argued (although a few years after this article) that causes and conditions can’t be distinguished objectively, because it depends on what historians and their audiences are prepared to take for granted, which might vary a lot. Although Burgess means a slightly different thing by conditions I think Rigby’s argument is still applicable here, because it ultimately concerns what to take for granted and what to explain. Some people might not think that baronial coups need explaining because they were just endemic in pre-modern England, but other people might want to know why they kept happening, and why they didn’t stop earlier, or carry on later. When Burgess says “There is nothing particularly unusual about either baronial revolts or religious wars” he seems to be saying the same thing that he earlier criticized Peter Laslett for saying.

And third, because accepting something as “just how it was” makes it appear natural and puts it beyond criticism. Unequal distribution of resources and oppression of women are basic facts of history, and not particularly unusual. At what point do they stop being “just how it was” and start being contemporary problems that we have to deal with in our own lives? (The discussion over at Smashing the Window about the tension between history and contemporary history is particularly relevant here.)

Every historical narrative necessarily has to take many things for granted, but I don’t think it’s healthy if we all take the same things for granted.

Finally, one of the biggest problems of causation is hinted at, but not dealt with in any detail. Burgess rightly points out that when Conrad Russell found the outbreak of civil war in 1642 to be a peculiarity of Charles I’s reign which was unlikely to have happened to Henry VIII, he needed to explain what was different. “The account is incomplete, dependent on something else which is itself in need of explanation” (p. 623). Or, as Keith Jenkins asked “how far back and how far afield” do you need to go? Only you can decide, and your decision will be arbitrary.

Overall this is a fascinating but frustrating article as it seems to get so close to a postmodern breakthrough but then pulls back at the last minute. It could have had a more radical conclusion, but at the time it was written that wouldn’t have been fashionable and would have aroused a lot of hostility, so perhaps it isn’t fair to criticize Glenn Burgess for not being too far ahead of his time. I wonder how far he realized the implications of what he was nearly saying, and how he would approach these questions today, now that Michael Braddick and Malcolm Wanklyn are quite happy to accept some postmodern ideas.

1. Glenn Burgess, ‘On revisionism : an analysis of early Stuart historiography in the 1970s and 1980s’, Historical Journal, 33 (1990), pp. 609-27.
2. Keith Jenkins, Re-figuring History (Routledge, 2002).
3. Keith Jenkins, Re-thinking History (Routledge, 2003, first pub. 1991).

Causation has always been a problem for me. I remember as an undergraduate struggling to write a 2,000 word essay explaining the French Revolution, and ending up thinking “what’s the point?”. My PhD thesis was mostly about describing rather than explaining, and where the conclusion touched on the reasons for the outcome of the English Civil War it was particularly weak. My first article mostly revolves around the question “continuity or change?” rather than “why?”, and I only ended up making strong claims about the causes of price changes in order to win an argument with the reviewer. But now I’m working on the Difficult Second Article, where I decided I could make the empirical data sexier by linking it to the debate on the causes of the English Civil War. That was probably a bad idea as it’s taking much longer than I expected, but I’ve put too much time and effort into it to abandon it now, and I need another publication on my CV as soon as possible to help with funding applications. So as well as digging into the mountain of historiography on the civil wars/revolution/whatever I’ve been looking into theories of causation.

There now follow some esoteric theoretical thoughts on an article by Steve Rigby (from 1996, so not necessarily the latest thing, but it’s a useful starting point even if the author might have moved on since then) on causal hierarchies, taking in Keith Jenkins along the way. Don’t be surprised if I’ve misunderstood some of it – this blog was always meant to be about thinking in public.

Rigby argues against hierarchies of causation: the idea that although most historical events have multiple necessary causes, those causes can be ranked in order of how important they were. He easily demolishes both the Marxist position that there is a universal hierarchy of causes (usually with class at the top), and the traditional historiography which says that hierarchies vary according to time, place, and other circumstances. The argument against hierarchies goes something like this: if several causes are all necessary in order for something to take place, then it makes no sense to rank them, because they are all equally important. Without any one of them the event that you’re trying to explain wouldn’t have happened. Furthermore, there is no way to distinguish between causes and conditions. It all depends on the point of view of historians and their audiences. What are they interested in? What are they prepared to take as given, and what do they think needs explaining?

This is all good, but then he comes up against Keith Jenkins and things get a bit less convincing. Jenkins argues that causal chains are inevitably infinite because whenever we identify a factor that caused something, we also need to know what caused that. There is no obvious or natural point at which we can stop following the chain “backwards and outwards” (in theory at least; in practice loss of records allows us to stop sooner or later!). Rigby argues that abandoning causal hierarchies does not require us to keep following an infinite chain, and claims that his own argument does not lead to relativism or nihilism. That’s true up to a point, because his argument is based on a scenario where we agree that various causes are all necessary. In that case we can’t rank them in relation to each other, but it’s assumed that we’ve already rejected lots of other factors as being irrelevant or incompatible with our chosen causes. However, there’s nothing in the article which convincingly refutes relativism or nihilism.

There are two issues here: first, where you pick up the start of a causal chain, and second, how far you follow it. On the first, Rigby points out that not all explanations are equally valid, and gives examples of explanations which no-one would be likely to think were valid. But that doesn’t quite work. Rigby’s examples of invalid explanations are obviously invalid because they’re physically impossible. He doesn’t really have much to say about how to choose between explanations that are physically possible, and doesn’t give an example of an explanation which is possible but invalid for some other reason. If we rejected all explanations which are physically impossible we would still be left with lots of explanations which are physically possible, and therefore can’t automatically be dismissed, but which are not necessarily compatible with each other, so they can’t all be accepted at the same time. So we’re left with a large number of possible explanations, each of which is potentially valid and internally consistent. That means that there could be many different starting points to choose from before you even get as far as asking “how far back and how far afield” you want to follow the chain.

On the second point, Rigby argues that the length and breadth of the chain will be limited in practice by “first, of the existing state of knowledge in a particular field; secondly, of our own particular expertise; and thirdly, of the knowledge which we can take for granted on the part of our audience”. Earlier in the article he emphasizes how this is related to “the interests and purposes of the speaker”. Keith Jenkins points out how ideology and power might play a role here, as well as more mundane factors such as the accepted length for books and articles.

Ultimately Rigby’s attempt to refute relativisim and nihilism falls back on objectivity, despite arguments against objectivity earlier in the article, stating that “causes, in the sense of multiple conditions, objectively exist in the real world and are knowable by scientists and historians”. Jenkins rejects objectivity on philosophical grounds. Even if you don’t follow him that far, the conflation of scientists and historians, past and present, looks suspicious. If causes in the present are knowable by scientists, it doesn’t logically follow that causes in the past are knowable by historians. If objectivity was attainable, would that necessarily make a definitive causal explanation possible, or would it still be too big and complicated even if all the false explanations could be eliminated?

In any case Steve Rigby made a very strong argument against ranking causes, which no-one can really disagree with: if you have a set of necessary causes you can’t say that one is more necessary than the others. They’re all necessary. It’s as simple as that, and it holds up regardless of what methodology you use to arrive at your necessary causes. Since his argument makes no claims about how necessary causes can or should be identified (and doesn’t need to) it clearly doesn’t lead to nihilism or relativism, but it doesn’t really depend on objectivity either. That he tried to go further is possibly a product of the time when he was writing as in the mid-90s when the theory wars were at their height (apparently – I didn’t really notice at the time, as I’ve said somewhere before) even the very mild relativism of arguing against ranking causes would have been more controversial than it deserved to be.

1. Keith Jenkins, Re-thinking History (Routledge, 2003, first pub. 1991).
2. S. H. Rigby, ‘Historical causation: is one thing more important than another?’, History, 80 (1996), pp. 227-42.

Malcolm Wanklyn, Decisive Battles of the English Civil War, (Barnsley, Pen and Sword, 2006); ISBN: 1844154548.

I’m just going to get straight to the point: this is the best book ever written about English Civil War battles. I’m not being sarcastic or damning it with faint praise. It really is that good. Wanklyn argues that previous methodology of battle reconstruction is inadequate, that familiar sources need to be reassessed, and that we really know far less than we thought we did about what really happened.

Wanklyn says this is not a postmodern book, but he is clearly open to new ideas and able to put them to good use. Citing Keith Jenkins, he reiterates that history is not the reconstruction of the past but a narrative created by a historian using traces of the past and heavily influenced by the historian’s circumstances and the expectations of the audience. He also reminds us that meaning is likely to be in the mind of the reader, not in the text. This is an encouraging sign that theory is not as controversial as it used to be, and that it can be incorporated into military history without an influx of impenetrable jargon. Wanklyn still believes that fact and fiction are absolute, but places a sliding scale of opinion in between. He makes it clear that in practice most of what we “know” about battles is somewhere on this scale. This is close enough to what I think. Although I don’t accept that there can be absolute facts, the sliding scale of probabilities can sometimes get close enough for it not to matter in practice.

In the past it has been all too easy to dip into an accepted canon of easily accessible primary sources to extract battle accounts without thinking too carefully about the origins of the text. We’ve all done it. I know I have. Wanklyn points out that many of these canonical sources are untrustworthy for various reasons. The frequently used printed sources are not always accurately transcribed from the original manuscripts and have sometimes been abridged or altered. The most dramatic example is Edmund Ludlow’s memoirs which were dealt with at length in Blair Worden’s Roundhead Reputations, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are doubts about the often cited memoirs of Sir Richard Bulstrode since only part of the original manuscript survives. Like many pamphlets in the Thomason Tracts, Lionel Watson’s account of Marston Moor was edited before being published. Drill books have also been used too trustingly to fill in the gaps in the primary accounts. Wanklyn points out that they were an ideal which was not necessarily achieved in practice. I might go even further than this as I have my doubts about whether cavalry drill books in this period influenced, or were influenced by, reality at all.

Battlefield archaeology has offered new evidence to add to our narratives, but there are dangers here too. Wanklyn is sceptical about patterns of recovered musket balls since they could have been dropped without being fired, and many might have disintegrated, been removed without being recorded, or moved from their original positions.

Having blown some big holes in what previous historians have written, Wanklyn goes on to offer his own versions of events at a selection of major battles. Since most of what happened in these battles doesn’t meet the criteria which he sets for fact, he offers only hypothetical narratives. Instead of creating a truth effect, he is honest about the limitations of the evidence and his interpretations of it. He refuses to speculate on some points, such as the number of soldiers at First Newbury, because a reliable answer is impossible to find. On other points, such as the length of the cavalry fight on the western flank at Naseby, he makes tentative conclusions but points out that the sources are too contradictory to allow any certainty. I would much rather see this kind of caution than overambitious and unsupported claims.

For a book with this title, there is surprisingly little discussion of decisiveness, but this is not particularly relevant and was dealt with in Wanklyn and Jones’s A Military History of the English Civil War (2005). For the purposes of critiquing previous reconstructions and offering new hypotheses, it doesn’t necessarily matter how decisive the battles were. This is more of a look at the canon of famous civil war battles. Therefore Marston Moor is included despite Wanklyn’s doubts about how much long-term impact it had, and Adwalton Moor is left out, despite David Johnson’s claims for its importance (see David Johnson, Adwalton Moor 1643 The Battle That Changed A War (2003; ISBN: 0954053583). I was slightly disappointed that Roundway Down didn’t make it in, as I would have thought it was both famous and important.

Too many previous historians have been too hostile to the earls of Essex and Manchester and over-estimated the genius of Cromwell. Wanklyn does not make this mistake, offering a balanced assessment of all the generals which recognizes the extent to which rival commanders tried to assassinate each others’ characters. There is still some blame for things that went wrong, but less than in most books. He also refuses to pour scorn on Prince Rupert for the defeat at Naseby, arguing that re-forming cavalry for a second charge was extremely difficult, and that even Cromwell only definitely achieved it once and possibly by accident. Furthermore we can’t be certain that it was Rupert who summoned the baggage train to surrender, and the royalist cavalry might have been trying to get to the other wing to attack Cromwell when they found their way blocked.

Wanklyn still maintains that the historiography is too dominated by determinism. While I’m not convinced that everyone is a determinist or that the people identified as determinists in A Military History all think the same things, we certainly agree that anyone who thinks that resources made the outcome of the civil war inevitable is wrong. In this book Wanklyn acknowledges that by 1645 the royalists were short of infantry, but he also points out that the decisions of their commanders made the situation worse, and that sometimes both sides threw away numerical advantages through bad decisions or bad luck. There is a lot more work to be done to explain the result of the war, and Wanklyn is dead right that it has been scandalously neglected compared to the amount of work on its causes.

Finally there is little sign of the “equine battering rams” interpretation of cavalry charges which I thought was the weakest point of A Military History. Wanklyn now argues that changes in cavalry tactics were less dramatic and less significant than Frank Jones suggested. This book makes infantry at least as important as cavalry.

Wanklyn’s conclusion that a definitive account of any civil war battle is unattainable is exactly the sort of thing I like to see. This is far from being a pessimistic view. There will always be room for more battle narratives, and that is an opportunity not a problem. It’s really exciting to see a historian relatively late in his career still coming up with new ideas and pushing the boundaries. This book, especially the first three chapters, should be read by anyone interested in military history. I’m really looking forward to the next volume, on generalship, which will complete the trilogy.

1. Keith Jenkins, Rethinking History (Routledge, February 2003).
2. David Johnson, Adwalton Moor 1643 the battle that changed a war (Blackthorn Press,: Pickering :, 2003).
3. Malcolm Wanklyn, Decisive Battles of the English Civil War (Pen & Sword Military, October 2006).
4. Maclolm D. G. Wanklyn and Frank Jones, A Military History of the English Civil War (Pearson: Harlow, 2005).
5. Blair Worden, Roundhead reputations (Allen Lane: London, 2001).

Last week I posted some thoughts in response to the discussions at A Historian’s Craft and Civil War Memory about history and philosophy. In that post I took some of the philosophical problems that affect history and tried to restate them in scientific terms. As Brett pointed out, this really amounted to stating the obvious in fairly uncontroversial terms, but I think that was worth doing in order to bypass the unproductive hostility between both extremes in the postmodernism wars (although the extent to which those extremes even exist is debatable). Whether the major problems we face as historians are philosophical, scientific, or a bit of both, the question remains: how much time should we spend thinking about these problems? In this post I’ll be discussing that question, but I have to warn you in advance that I can’t answer it. So there might not be much point reading any further…

First of all I have to say that I agree completely with Kevin Levin that as historians we can’t solve these problems ourselves. If cognitive scientists can’t work out what meaning is and where it comes from, then we have no chance. But while it would be naive and arrogant to attempt to find solutions to these problems, it would also be naive and arrogant to ignore them completely. I think we need to know something about the nature and extent of problems such as meaning so that we know how they affect our work. But how much is enough? Getting good at history is hard enough without also having to know about philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science or whatever. Maybe blogs can help here, because they provide an easy way to find out about unfamiliar areas. For example, I’ve relied quite heavily on Mixing Memory and Babel’s Dawn for science, and The Valve for philosophy and literary criticism. But how do we know if we can trust them if we don’t already know what they’re telling us? Could this also be a problem with peer reviewed publications which are outside our field?

Is it really worth trying to find out about problems which haven’t been solved yet and which we can’t possibly solve ourselves? The problem of meaning has major implications for history, but the jury is still out. It might stay out forever, or maybe just a lifetime. Right now we don’t even know where the answer is going to come from let alone what it will be. (If I had to make a wild speculation I’d guess that sooner or later the cognitive sciences will crack the meaning problem and that the answer will be equally uncomfortable for both empirical historians and post-structuralist theorists, but anyway…) Under these circumstances, we can’t confidently take any position, whether empirical or theoretical. We might all be wrong. Post-structuralist thought is valuable in that it reminds us that meaning is not straightforward, but that is hardly the last word. I found Elizabeth Clark’s History, Theory, Text quite disappointing because she promised that post-structuralism offered exciting new opportunities for medieval historians, but failed to deliver. Most of the book is a teleological triumphal progress towards post-structuralism in which she sneers at various historians and philosophers for not being post-structuralist enough. There’s far too little discussion of what post-structuralism can actually do for the historian. The way I see it, post-structuralism is a problem not a solution. I don’t want to ignore that problem, but I don’t want to admit defeat and stop writing on the grounds that people could just as easily find interesting meaning in words randomly generated by a computer.

(Somewhere in that paragraph I changed from first person plural to first person singular. Even I’m not sure what the significance of that is!)

So I believe that there are major problems confronting history, I realise that I can’t solve those problems, but I don’t want to ignore them either. Can I work around them in order to minimize their impact on my work? If the central problem is meaning then probably not. I used to think that digitization offered a way out of this dilemma because you could concentrate on transcribing documents without having to make any assumptions about what they mean: concentrate on information and exclude meaning. Now that I’ve tried digitizing text for myself I can see that it’s not as simple as that (see my theoretical agonizing here and here). Although meaning intrudes into every stage of the digitization process the problem is perhaps more manageable than it would be in literary criticism. Identifying the character string “Lt. R. E. W. Sandall” as a name and rank seems less problematic than interpreting the meaning of a poem (unless it’s by Jessie Pope maybe…). Once I’d established that my editing decisions were arbitrary, I had no problem getting on with it. I have a lot of sympathy for Kevin’s point that theory doesn’t seem to matter so much when you’re actually doing history. But am I deluding myself there? Or am I wasting time on unproductive thinking when I could be doing?

If you’re not convinced that what you’re doing is right, how do you motivate yourself to do the work? Historical research involves a lot of difficult and tedious work. You need a strong commitment to get through it. The possibility that my work could be proved completely worthless by new developments in a different discipline isn’t stopping me from doing history. There isn’t really anything new here. It’s always been accepted by most historians that future research could prove their own work wrong. New sources or new interpretations could easily overturn your conclusions. Historians have usually been able to carry on doing what they do rather than giving up in despair at the thought that they might be wrong.

The hypothetical extreme empiricists would be offended at the hypothetical extreme postmodernist’s suggestion that empiricism is just an arbitrary culturally constructed paradigm. I don’t have any problem with that suggestion. My “proper” work (ie my Phd thesis, my forthcoming article, and other projects that I’m working on) is mostly within the empirical paradigm. The rules and values of that paradigm are arbitrary, but that doesn’t automatically make it worthless. As Brett pointed out in response to my post last week, science is an arbitrary system constructed by human language and culture, but it’s a useful one which can predict or change the future. Empirical history can’t do that, but I still like it. Maybe that’s a lame justification, but it’s honest. I can’t make a strong case for any kind of history being really important, but I know that history is what I want to do. If I like it, and if there’s a paradigm that values my work, is that all I need? I also think that empirical research teaches valuable skills. Some of these are transferable to other careers (eg using databases, analytical thinking, project management) while others are more specialised (eg palaeography, latin). All of them are more valuable than ever in the age of digital history. We need people with these skills and familiarity with historical documents to work on digitization projects. You can only get good at these things through years of practical experience, not by reading Derrida. However, digitization projects also require familiarity with theories of text – structuralism, post-structuralism, and information theory are all highly relevant here.

Although I like working in the empirical paradigm, I also like to look outside it. Right now there still seems to be a big gap between my empirical and theoretical interests. Will I ever be able to bring them together, or are they incommensurable? If they are incommensurable, is being able to think about them both at the same time a strength or a weakness? I don’t want to get too attached to one way of doing things. I want to be as versatile as possible, but will that just make me a jack of all trades and master of none? There’s a serious danger of creating the appearance of being theoretically aware by lazily dropping the right buzzwords but not really understanding the ideas behind them. The phrase “truth effect” can create its own truth effect. In a comment to my previous post I mentioned this experiment which provides empirical proof of the truth effect: non-experts are more likely to accept bad explanations of psychological phenomena if they include irrelevant neuroscience terminology. Now I’m wondering how terminology affects perceptions of historical writing. I’d like to see more experiments here, but do psychologists consider history interesting and important enough to be the object of their study?

Thinking too much is bad, but so is not thinking enough. I don’t think there’s a single point in the middle that’s exactly right. Different amounts of thinking suit different people. Ultimately everyone needs to make their own decisions. And so I’ve written nearly 1,500 words without really saying anything. Does that make me a philosopher? No, just a blogger.

1. Elizabeth A. Clark, History, Theory, Text (Harvard UP: Cambridge, MA, 2004).

Rachel at A Historian’s Craft and Kevin at Civil War Memory have both been thinking about how much historians should think about philosophy. Although they take different positions on the issue, they both approach it in a refreshingly un-polemical fashion (contrast with the “that’s you that is” pettiness of this embarrassing exchange between Alun Munslow and Arthur Marwick). It’s almost inevitable that the p-word comes up, but it’s interesting that the word “postmodernism” seems to be used more often by people who are against it than people who are for it, whatever it is. Too often it seems to be a label attached to a conflation of lots of different (and not always compatible) theories, but let’s stick with the stereotypical view of postmodernism for now. Here are two recognisable stereotypes:

The traditional empiricist, who believes that what historians do is to scientifically examine archival evidence to find out what really happened in the past, something which is achievable if you eliminate bias.

The postmodernist who believes that everything is culturally constructed, that an objective scientific study of the past is impossible, and that even science itself is an ideologically suspect paradigm.

Whether these stereotypes are true or not (and you should always be suspicious of stereotyping – isn’t it funny how stereotypes are always someone else?) they crudely illustrate what I’m trying to get at in this post: that both extremes in the postmodernism wars seem to have a stereotypical and inaccurate view of science.

First of all I have to say that most scientists would laugh at the idea that history can be scientific, but that seems so obvious that it’s hardly worth discussing. The more interesting point is that science undermines some of the assumptions of traditional empirical history and supports some points of view which might be characterised as “postmodern”.

Chris at Mixing Memory says: “Spend a little time in a cognitive science lab, and you will quickly be disabused of any inclinations towards naive realism.” Spend some time reading Mixing Memory and you’ll find plenty of empirical scientific evidence that human perceptions can be very unreliable (even before conscious bias has any chance to act on them) and that language can influence perception. In this post Chris discusses linguistic relativity and looks at an experiment which appears to show that the colour terms in a language influence how people perceive colour. He points out that colour perception is one of the hardest areas in which to prove linguistic influence, but that the influence of language on concepts such as gender is much less controversial.

Language isn’t just problematic because of its insidious influence on perception and conceptualisation. The biggest problem is meaning. Post-structuralist theory (often conflated with postmodernism but not quite the same thing) suggests that meaning does not reside in text and cannot be fixed. This is a controversial idea to some people, but I don’t see many convincing arguments against it. So far science has been unable to even define what meaning is, let alone where it comes from. Edmund Blair Bolles grapples with the problem at Babel’s Dawn (here and here), a blog devoted to investigating the evolutionary origins of human speech. His mention of Searle’s “Chinese room” is particularly interesting here. Searle has been criticised for failing to define “understanding” but I don’t blame him for that because nobody really knows. Whatever it is, his thought experiment convincingly demonstrates that computers do not understand anything in the way that humans do. All the work that has gone into Artificial Intelligence has failed to come up with a machine which can understand the meaning of human language. Even passing the Turing test (which only requires creating the illusion of talking to a real person, not actual understanding) is surprisingly difficult. If language is as straightforward as the opponents of post-structuralism believe, then shouldn’t it be easy for machines to understand?

Nothing actually is what it’s called. Science can give us some incidental illustrations of this principle at work. Not too long ago, astronomers decided to change their definition of “planet” so that it no longer included Pluto. These astronomers clearly recognised that they are not just neutrally discovering what’s out there. Instead they are classifying things according to an arbitrary taxonomy which they have constructed themselves. If that taxonomy turns out not to be very useful for its intended purpose then it can be changed. But we all know that that’s not how the move was interpreted outside astronomy. Some people got quite emotional about it – Pluto is a planet because everyone knows it is!

When he laid the foundations of information theory, Claude Shannon was careful to separate information from meaning. A mathematician and engineer writing equations about the transmission of signals might be a prime suspect for being a realist/reductionist/whatever, but thanks to the separation of meaning from information Shannon’s theory is compatible with structuralism and post-structuralism.

But the real point I want to make about information theory is the way it undermines reconstruction of the past. (A lot of what I know about this come from Andrew Hickey, who explains it here) Complete information allows you to reconstruct the original message exactly as it was. In Shannon’s calculations the message was either a series of characters drawn from a finite set, or a continuous signal, such as a sound wave. If the message we want to reconstruct is the reality of the past then we clearly don’t have enough information to reconstruct anything. At best, historical sources (whether they’re documents, photographs, films, sound recordings) only capture some aspects of reality (and remember that reality is usually filtered through people’s perception and cognition, with all the problems that cognitive science has identified).

Another thing I learned from Andrew Hickey is Ashby’s first law of cybernetics, which he sums up as: in order to be in control of something, you need more available options than possible outcomes. This has major implications for historical causation. Think of how many possible outcomes there are when ruling a country or commanding an army. Can we really talk about anyone in history being in control of anything? This is one of the reasons why I’m dissatisfied with the explanations offered by most historians. Should we be talking about “influence” rather than “command” or “control”?

Chaos theory makes things even more difficult. In a chaotic system, small changes in the initial conditions can produce disproportionately large difference in the outcome. These systems can be difficult to model accurately because of their complexity, which is a major problem for counter-factual thinking. The consequences of something in history happening slightly differently might be wildly unpredictable.

This post is a fairly superficial introduction to things I don’t really understand very well (and I haven’t even gone into quantum theory, where things get really crazy) but if I’m even half right you’d have to ask why an extreme empiricist would cling to science and an extreme postmodernist would reject science. Maybe they don’t. After all, I did start with some unrealistic stereotypes. Nevertheless, it should now be clear that we do have some big problems here. Can we just ignore them and get on with doing history? If not, how much time should we spend thinking about them? I’ll be thinking about that in the next post.

1. C E Shannon, ‘A mathematical theory of communication’, Bell System Technical Journal, 27 (1948), pp. 379-423, 623-656.

Yesterday I went to the Institute of Historical Research to hear Peter Burke talking about “Strengths and Weaknesses of Cultural History 1980-2006″. Judging by how full the Pollard room was this was a major event. I thought I might be out of my depth there, but as it turned out I didn’t hear anything that surprised me or that I couldn’t understand. The paper was a very general overview of cultural history which did pretty much what the title suggests. I can’t remember all the points because I wasn’t taking notes, but most of the suggested strengths and weaknesses were fairly obvious. I didn’t take part in the discussion at the time because it was already going on long enough and I wanted to get away (and also didn’t want to embarrass myself by asking stupid questions of course!), but other people asked some interesting questions. This post was going to be an attempt to summarise the paper, but it went off on various tangents.

Perhaps the best point that Peter Burke made was about cultural construction: the idea that many things which have been assumed to be natural (eg gender, sexuality) are really cultural phenomena. He asked: who is doing the constructing and what material are they using for the construction? This is an important question that too often goes unasked. The constructing in “cultural construction” is very rarely an active verb. We might know that the object is constructed, but who or what is the subject doing the constructing? There might not be an easy answer to that question, but that’s no reason to avoid it. The Marxist answer would be either that the construction of culture is determined by the economic base, or that culture is manipulated by the ruling elite through “repressive structures” in order maintain their power. Recent work by social historians on power and authority tends to show that it’s much more complicated than that (for early modern England see various works by Michael Braddick, John Walter, Steve Hindle, and Andy Wood). In Marxist terms, a conservative cultural ideology which maintains the status quo would be seen as serving the interests of the ruling classes and working against the interests of the lower classes. However, that ideology would also limit the freedom of the elite. If they try to change things too much they might face opposition from the lower orders who want things to stay as they are. If the elite go too far they can compromise their own legitimacy and ultimately bring about their own downfall. Enclosure riots are a good example of non-elite action to enforce conservative ideology, and even the English Civil War can be seen in these terms: conservative parliamentarians reacting against the innovations of Charles I.

This is not to say that ideology necessarily serves the interests of the lower classes either. It would be more accurate to say that cultural ideologies place some limits on all members of a society (but those limits are not usually equal), and that they do not entirely or constantly serve the interests of any easily identifiable group or individual. Even something as overt, artificial, and seemingly simplistic as fascism might not always do what its inventors want it to. I remember hearing a paper (several years ago) by Dave Gould about his research on football hooligans in fascist Italy. It’s easy for liberal intellectuals to assume that fascist thugs and football hooligans are the same thing, but their aims and motivations were not always the same. While Mussolini’s fascist vision encouraged nationalism and violence, it also emphasised order and discipline. The disorder and parochialism of football crowds did not fit in with this vision, and the embarrassment of major trouble at international matches undermined rather than reinforced national pride.

If historical evidence doesn’t suggest any obvious candidates for the mysterious constructors of culture, then where is it coming from, and can we really talk about it being constructed? It might be more appropriate to talk about cultural phenomena “emerging”, but we still have to ask what or where are these things emerging from and how? Evolutionary psychologists want to reduce it all to selective pressures but I think that’s an oversimplification. Even Richard Dawkins recognises that some aspects of culture (such as religious restrictions on sex, particularly celibate clergy) don’t serve any purpose for “the selfish gene”. It’s interesting to note that there’s some tension between militant atheism and evolutionary reductionism here: if religion is evil and needs to be destroyed then it can’t also be natural and useful.

Some followers of Dawkins believe that while culture is not biologically determined, it does develop in a way which is closely analogous to biological evolution: the meme is the basic cultural unit in the same way that the gene is the basic biological unit. As I’ve said before (and will probably say again) I’m not convinced by that. At best the meme is an arbitrary unit of information with no inherent meaning. It might help us to map what happens to some bits of culture, but I can’t see it helping to explain anything. Bill Benzon‘s work on the evolution of culture is much more subtle and interesting, but we still need to know more about language, meaning, and above all the human brain. The physical characteristics of the brain must have some influence on culture, if only by placing some limits on thoughts and memories, but culture creates an artificial environment with its own selective pressures.

While Peter Burke acknowledged the danger of reducing all history to cultural explanations at the expense of other causes, and pointed out the difficulty of defining such a large and fluid field as cultural history, he didn’t say much about the more fundamental problems of defining and explaining culture itself. What is culture? How does it work? I’d like to see more cultural historians tackling these problems. We also need to look at culture in less anthropocentric terms. In the discussion Robert Burns made a good point that all human history is cultural history, because most things that humans do which are of interest to historians are unique to human culture. However, we need to be careful to avoid a binary opposition between human and animal. There is increasing evidence of animals using tools (chimps have been in the news recently). There is also some experimental evidence that monkeys have mental concepts of the predators signified by alarm calls and can critically evaluate the calls rather than automatically responding to them (see review of Why We Talk at Babel’s Dawn). This is looking more like language and culture than instinctive behaviour.

If animals do have their own rudimentary culture, it would be impossible for historians to study it because of the lack of evidence. However, the same problem arises with early humans. It has been common to suppose that the appearance of symbolic material culture, evidenced by surviving artefacts, marks the beginnings of human language, but Edmund Blair Bolles takes the view that speech is likely to be much older than symbolic culture. By emphasising speech as a tool for directing joint attention, he implies that focusing too heavily on symbolic culture is jumping the gun. Early speech might have had a closer relationship with the real than later symbolic representations would have.

It now looks difficult to define “human”. Is it all about genes, or is it our unique culture which makes us human? While surviving evidence cannot prove the existence of symbolic culture more than 200,000 years ago, EBB suggests that homo habilis could have been speaking a few words 2 million years ago and that homo erectus could have had a sophisticated spoken language 1 million years ago. At what point did the few words of homo habilis become different enough from monkey alarm calls to count as something unique or special? The first words might even have been adapted from monkey alarm calls!

Maybe we don’t always have to worry about what happened 2 million years ago to understand the more recent past, but it’s important to remember that nothing is fixed or permanent. During the discussion, the person on my left asked a brilliant question: how far back and how far afield do you have to go to provide a sufficient and necessary explanation of the cultural phenomenon of the bottle of mineral water on the table in front of you? It was disappointing that Peter Burke was completely unable to deal with that question. To me, the obvious answer would be: it depends on how much explanation you want. There is no self-evident optimum amount of explanation. There isn’t even any minimum or maximum. It all depends on how much the historian and audience agree to take for granted as not needing to be explained. The purpose of doing history, whether you admit it or not, is to make other people agree with you. Therefore, you need enough explanation to convince the people you’re trying to convince. How much that is depends on who they are and what their expectations are. I’m becoming increasingly aware that the audience is a central part of history: what you write or say is necessarily influenced by the target audience. It’s possible to take the explanation of a bottle of mineral water back to homo habilis 2 million years ago, or even further, and there is no reason why you shouldn’t. Deciding what is and isn’t relevant to a historical enquiry is an arbitrary decision. We have to make those arbitrary decisions in order to make research and writing manageable, but we must never forget that they are arbitrary.